Unified Communications Featured Article

Unified Communications Market Growing, Driven By Digital Transformation Strategies

By Erik Linask
Group Editorial Director

As businesses continue to reinvent their technology strategies in the age of digital transformation and customer-centricity, unified communications is becoming an increasingly important part of their end-to-end business processes.  Unified communications is about much more than being able to make and receive calls from mobile devices, or being able access email and other corporate resources remotely.  These are merely a few fragments of the many that create a unified experience and break down traditional communications gaps in siloed business structures.

Rather, the concept of a unified enterprise is starting to take hold, driven by unified communications technologies, along with comprehensive product development and customer experience strategies that require the participation of all departments for successful execution.

Across all markets, business processes are being rebuilt around automation and artificial intelligence, an ability to engage anyone within organizations to help with internal and external engagements, and to effectively collaborate from anywhere in the world with a consistent experience across devices and networks.  The result is greater business efficiency, increased customer satisfaction, more engaged employees, and revenue growth.

These new business strategies along with business expansion into international markets – requiring integrated communications across geographic markets – are driving continued growth in the unified communications market, which Grand View Research projects will eclipse $143 billion by 2024 – a massive 16.8 percent CAGR. 

An additional factor boosting projections to new heights is a surge in cloud computing adoption, which is driving demand for cloud and hosted UC services.  Particularly as legacy on-premises systems are no longer able to deliver the communications capabilities required for agile business models, a throng of cloud providers are seeing tremendous interest in their models.

Modern business strategies also include new outlooks for customer service leveraging artificial intelligence, thanks in large part to its use in consumer environments – think Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and other speech-driven capabilities.  AI is enabling more efficient customer engagements, including more complex self service capabilities.  For customers with problems that require human intervention, unified communications is enabling cross-departmental collaboration.  In other words, customer service has been flipped on its head and contact center agents are able to easily call on various subject matter experts to help with customer needs thanks to unified communications integrated across entire businesses, including contact centers.

The end result for businesses is better customer service and internal communication.  For the UC market, it means continued growth as companies see an increasing demand to jettison their existing communications solutions in favor of alternatives that will help truly create unified enterprises.  After all, if communications aren’t unified, how can business operations be?